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The workshop will bring together researchers from both worlds: those using collaboratively created resources in NLP applications such as information retrieval, named entity recognition, or keyword extraction, and those using NLP applications for improving the resources or extracting different types of semantic information from them. Hopefully, this will turn into a feedback loop, where NLP techniques improved by collaboratively constructed resources are used to improve the resources in exchange.

Co-located with Joint conference of the 47th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 4th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing of the Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing

Introduction In recent years, online resources collaboratively constructed by ordinary users on the Web have considerably influenced the NLP community. In many works, they have been used as a substitute for conventional semantic resources and as semantically structured corpora with great success. While conventional resources such as WordNet are developed by trained linguists [1], online semantic resources can now be automatically extracted from the content collaboratively created by the users [2]. Thereby, the knowledge acquisition bottlenecks and coverage problems pertinent to conventional lexical semantic resources can be overcome.

The resource that has gained the greatest popularity in this respect so far is Wikipedia. However, other resources recently discovered in NLP, such as folksonomies, the multilingual collaboratively constructed dictionary Wiktionary, or Q&A sites like WikiAnswers or Yahoo! Answers are also very promising. Moreover, new wiki-based platforms such as Citizendium or Knol have recently emerged that offer features distinct from Wikipedia and are of high potential in terms of their use in NLP.

The benefits of using Web-based resources come along with new challenges, such as the interoperability with existing resources and the quality of the knowledge represented. As collaboratively created resources lack editorial control, they are typically incomplete. For the interoperability with conventional resources, the mappings have to be investigated. The quality of collaboratively constructed resources is questioned in many cases, and the information extraction remains a complicated task due to the incompleteness and semi- structuredness of the content. Therefore, the research community has begun to develop and provide tools for accessing collaboratively constructed resources [2,5].

The above listed challenges actually present a chance for NLP techniques to improve the quality of Web-based semantic resources. Researchers have therefore proposed techniques for link prediction [3] or information extraction [4] that can be used to guide the "crowds" to construct resources that are better suited for being used in NLP in return.

Topics The workshop will bring together researchers from both worlds: those using collaboratively created resources in NLP applications such as information retrieval, named entity recognition, or keyword extraction, and those using NLP applications for improving the resources or extracting different types of semantic information from them. Hopefully, this will turn into a feedback loop, where NLP techniques improved by collaboratively constructed resources are used to improve the resources in exchange.

Specific topics include but are not limited to: - Different types of collaboratively constructed resources, such as wiki-based platforms, Q&A sites or folksonomies; - Using collaboratively constructed resources in NLP such as information retrieval, text categorization, information extraction, etc.; - Analyzing the properties of collaboratively constructed resources related to their use in NLP; - Interoperability of collaboratively constructed resources with conventional semantic resources and between themselves; - Converting unstructured information into structured lexical semantic information; tools for mining social and collaborative content; - Quality issues with respect to collaboratively constructed resources.

We also encourage the submission of short papers describing publicly available tools for accessing or analyzing collaboratively created resources. During the breaks, tables can be provided for demonstrations.

Invited Speaker Rada Mihalcea, University of North Texas

Submission Information Full paper submissions should follow the two-column format of ACL-IJCNLP 2009 proceedings without exceeding eight (8) pages of content plus one extra page for references. Short paper submissions should also follow the two-column format of ACL-IJCNLP 2009 proceedings, and should not exceed four (4) pages, including references.

Submission will be electronic using a submission software that will be available later at the conference website. All accepted papers will be presented orally and published in the workshop proceedings.

The Third Scandinavian Ph.D. Conference in Linguistics and Philology in Bergen, June 16-18, 2009.

Call for Papers

The Third Scandinavian Ph.D. Conference in Linguistics and Philology in Bergen will be hosted by the Ph.D. Research School in Linguistics and Philology at the University of Bergen.

Invited speakers at the conference are: - Andrew Chesterman, University of Helsinki - Gjert Kristoffersen, University of Bergen - Coco Norén, Uppsala University

We welcome one-page abstracts on all aspects of Linguistics, Philology and related disciplines. The abstracts should be submitted anonymously, preferably in PDF-format, to the conference official e-mail, doktorandkonferanseuib.no, no later than February 1, 2009. Notifications on abstracts will be sent out on March 1, 2009. All queries should be directed to doktorandkonferanseuib.no.

English will be the official language of the conference and we encourage all participants to submit their abstracts in English, although abstracts in any of the Scandinavian languages will not be rejected. We also welcome abstracts from Ph.D. candidates and early stage researcher outside of Scandinavia.